


Normal

by kerlin



Category: Alias
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-31
Updated: 2010-08-31
Packaged: 2017-10-11 09:10:07
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,749
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/110760
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kerlin/pseuds/kerlin
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sydney's halfway there.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Normal

She’d had a lot of aliases, but in some ways, Amy Tippin was the one that really mattered.

Will’s red-headed sister never knew her passport had been borrowed, and would later believe that the charges on her credit card went to feed her brother’s addiction. She severed all ties with Sydney when the news first broke as a gesture of defiance, and never knew about Will’s relationship with Francie because she moved to Seattle with a software engineer just before Allison Doren appeared on the scene.

It was Amy’s persona she had assumed for that first trip to Taipei, her proving ground, her own personal hell, and it was as Amy that she met Vaughn for the first time.

Later, Sydney would think of Amy when she thought of Nadia. Will’s relationship with his sister had been a constant in college, the teasing and scuffling and the easy, open love that she could only admire from afar. She’d probably fallen in love with Danny, at least in part, because of his devotion to his brother. Siblings were hallowed ground for her.

The circumstances couldn’t be more different, but at the first glimpse of Nadia in the Chechen hospital bed, Sydney recognized and welcomed the emotions her sister evoked. During the weeks that followed, she made hesitant advances and felt akin to what her father must have. She had no idea how to relate to this woman who shared one-half of her DNA and one-half of the man she hated more than any other. But she tried, and for a time it felt like she was more successful than not. Until Sloane once again took away someone she loved.

That time had been so full of disruption: Vaughn’s capture and torture, Katya’s betrayal, Lauren’s death, the discoveries at Wittenberg. Burying her mother. Relationships had been inverted. Her father, once again an unknown quantity. Her mother, loved and hated and mourned. Vaughn, more broken than she could deal with, and so she’d pushed him away, avoided his calls, watched from afar as he slowly self-destructed, and hated herself for her complete inability – and unwillingness – to help him.

But somehow it had all equalized, as much as things ever did in her life. For the first time since the brief breathing time between the takedown of SD-6 and Allison's unmasking, Sydney found herself remembering what it felt like to be normal.

She had a job she had chosen, instead of one that had chosen her. She had a sister who slept down the hall and fought with her over the shower in the morning. She had the man she’d once called her soulmate back in her life. And she had friends who would walk through fire for her and whose loyalty she would return without thinking.

Sure, her job almost got her killed every day. Sure, her sister would kill her father if she ever found out the truth about Irina. Sure, her lover still had a long way to go before he was anything close to sane and healthy.

But it had been so long since there was even water in the glass, much less the choice to look at it as half-full, that Sydney found herself in the uncharacteristic role of counting her blessings.

"Her name was – and I’m not even joking, here – April First." Weiss was gesturing with a forkful of chicken casserole and Vaughn was sinking his head into his hands with an expression of abject misery.

"More wine?" Sydney offered, a wry smile on her face, and he smiled back at her.

"As much as possible, please," Vaughn answered, and tapped his fingers on her forearm as she leaned over to refill his glass with the white wine he’d brought over for dinner. Her smile turned teasing, and she trailed her hand across his shoulders as she returned to her seat.

"What?" Nadia asked, her own wine glass poised in mid-sip as she watched the other three dinner guests.

"You need a new story, man," Vaughn informed his friend, who put a hand over his heart and did his best to look grievously wounded.

"It’s a good story!" Weiss insisted, and set the fork back down on his plate. "With a happy ending and everything."

"She broke up with you a week later."

"Ah, yes, but what a week." Weiss settled his chin in the palm of his hand and affected a dreamy, far-off expression that caused Nadia to break into giggles.

Sydney watched them, three of the people she loved most in the world, and felt unhesitatingly happy and free. She resolved to hold the feeling for as long as she could and took another bite of green beans.

"Do you still have the guitar?" Nadia asked, setting her wine glass back down in favor of another forkful of chicken casserole.

"I do, I do, actually," Weiss said. "Somehow it survived the move to LA. I think it’s in a back closet somewhere. I couldn’t bear to get rid of it."

Sydney almost chimed in to say that she had her saxophone still around somewhere, and thus pave the way for a half-dozen band geek jokes, but then she remembered that her much-loved instrument was melted slag in the ruins of her old apartment.

The thought paralyzed her for a second, and then she pushed her chair out from the table, refusing to let it get to her. "I’ll go grab dessert."

"I’ll help," Vaughn immediately offered, and reached across for Nadia and Weiss’s dinner plates before she could add anything else. She shrugged and ducked her head to hide the half-smile as she shouldered the patio door open. They were eating outside, enjoying the last of the true porch weather before the rainy season set in.

She set her plate in the sink and braced her arms against the counter, closing her eyes and taking a deep breath to dispel any of a dozen memories connected to the loss of her saxophone, her apartment, her _life_, and then Vaughn’s hands were on her shoulders.

He turned her around and she met his lips willingly, slanting her mouth under his to deepen the kiss as his hands cupped her face and held her close. It wasn’t a kiss about passion, though things were quickly heading that way as Sydney flattened her palms against the hard muscles of his lower back. She ignored the note of discordance in the desperation expressed by his touch, in his need to hold her as close as possible before she slipped away again, and instead concentrated on the warm, earthy smell of him.

He broke off the kiss first, and she leaned her forehead down to his shoulder. He dropped a kiss on her hair and circled her in his arms, and for a little while she found calm and safety there. Not for long, though, because his ragged breath soon told her he was fighting his own demons – the last time Weiss had told this story, Vaughn had been in a hospital bed with Lauren doting on him – and she remembered just how precarious their footing was.

"I have to get the mousse out of the fridge," she whispered, and ducked out of his arms, but not before kissing the corner of his jaw on her way out. As she opened the fridge, she heard Vaughn stacking dishes in the sink behind her, turning the water on to soak some of the food off before actually washing them later that night.

She reveled in the sounds of the evening: Nadia laughing again as Weiss chattered on at his most endearing, Vaughn turning off the tap and shaking his hands free of water, and the clink of glass as she took out the mousse cups and set them on the counter, long stems cool between her fingers. She thought about dozens of nights when it had been Will rattling dishes, Francie and Charlie laughing on the patio. Or Danny running water while Will and Amy bickered over the remote.

For once, she was able to enjoy those memories without a bittersweet pang overwhelming every other thought. She hoped that Will was eating dinner with his painter, and that Charlie was singing his heart out in a smoky nightclub, and that Danny and Francie had found some measure of peace, wherever it was their souls had moved on to.

Dinner-table philosophy seemed both too mundane and too pretentious for a life like hers, like all of theirs, because try as she might to convince Weiss of it, she wasn’t a loan officer with California Credit. Tomorrow morning she and Nadia and Vaughn and Dixon were flying to Bogota to take down a drug lord, and tomorrow night there might be one less face around the table.

Nadia laughed again, and chided Weiss in her rolling accent as Vaughn flicked water at her and jarred her from her thoughts. Startled, she spun around to see him wearing a cocky grin, and retaliated by tackling him.

His clever fingers poked at her ribs, and she bit down on the very girlish squeal that threatened to emerge. Swiftly, Sydney responded by hooking her leg around his knee, forcing him to stumble back against the kitchen counter.

The mock-fight lasted until Vaughn decided to stop her by leaning down and kissing her senseless, and she struggled for a few seconds until she decided that if she had to lose a fight, this was definitely the way to go.

"Hey, uh, guys? I’m all for it, but do it on your own time. You know, when you’re not holding my dessert hostage."

Sydney broke the kiss and felt a slight flush creep up her cheeks at her unintended voyeurism. She kissed Vaughn on the cheek before turning to grab the mousse and stuck her tongue out at Weiss while she passed him on the way to the patio table.

Nadia greeted her with a smile and helped set the mousse cups around the table while Sydney refilled everyone's wine glasses. They worked silently and together, and Sydney couldn't stop smiling.

Hearing Vaughn regale them with stories of Weiss’s disastrous first week in Clandestine Services Training, of his pranks and near-expulsions and bad accents, she realized that this wasn’t exactly what anyone else would call normal. It wasn’t what Amy Tippin, even with her day-glo hair and her junkie brother, would have called normal.

But it was what Sydney called normal, and she treasured every second of it.


End file.
